Monday, December 18, 2017

A Holiday-Card Craft for Kids Who Don't Like Crafting

My 4-year-old son's team at preschool consists of a lot of teachers, teaching assistants, aides, and therapists, and I wanted to give them each a homemade card for Christmas as a thank-you for their work with him.I liked the idea of my son helping me make each card using fine-motor skills he's been working on at school. He doesn't particularly like doing arts and crafts, though—they're often tricky for him because of his cerebral palsy—so I knew I needed to minimize the amount of time he'd need to spend on the cards.Here's what I came up with for making 16 cards in one short go (for him):I started with 8 holiday cards, blank on the inside, plus 3 sheets of colored card stock paper, star stickers, tape, scissors, a pencil, and non-toxic paint:

I also used a glue stick and a marker, which I forgot to include in this pic. Whoops.

I taped the 8 holiday cards together such that only the bottom inside half of each card was showing, and I made a Christmas tree overlay out of 2 sheets of yellow card stock:

To make the Christmas tree overlay, I first made a stencil of a single Christmas tree by folding a sheet of orange card stock into fourths and cutting off one-fourth of it...

...and then folding that small piece in half, drawing half a Christmas tree on it, and cutting the Christmas tree out:

I used this stencil on another sheet of card stock that I had folded into four equal vertical sections.

I used the stencil in the same way on a second sheet of yellow card stock, and I cut out all of the Christmas trees, leaving me with 8 stuck-together holiday cards and a Christmas tree overlay, as shown earlier and again below:

I placed the overlay directly over the 8 stuck-together holiday cards and taped the 2 sheets together in various places, including right around each Christmas tree.I put a blob of green acrylic paint in the center of each Christmas tree and encouraged my son to paint the Christmas trees with his fingers. Here's what he came up with:

I separated the overlay from the cards:

I un-taped the cards, and I cut the Christmas tree overlay into 8 pieces and used a glue stick to secure them to individual cards. I then added a brief message to the top of each card and a star sticker to the top of each Christmas tree:

One of my favorite things about these cards is that it's clear that my son helped. 💕